Everytime governments try to break encryption on social media, and they are doing it a lot these days, they hold up an example such as in this case “Sex Traffickers” so if you dare question them, you are exposed as supporting Sex Trafficking, of course this is nonsense, there will always be alternative secure method that the bad guys will use, and law abiding public will be left exposed.

Hard to tell if they just don’t want the law abiding to be secure for their own purposes, Governments have been known to want to spy on their general population. But the better alternative is that they just want to be seen to be doing something about all that bad stuff on the internet. Maybe it’s a mix of both.Details here: https://act.eff.org/action/don-t-let-congress-censor-the-internet

There is a mostly unreported and unrecognised ongoing attack on our research institutes, commerce and infrastructure, massively damaging our successes in the western world.

UC Cert, the United States Computer Emergency Team released an update (TA17-117A) last week from the The (US) National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) “Intrusions Affecting Multiple Victims Across Multiple Sectors“, this recent one details an ongoing sophisticated attack on wide ranging industries. These attacks do not end in the male enhancement spamming campaigns, website sites defaced with ads for fake designer goods or stolen credit cards that all become apparent soon after the attack.

They are silent, deeply embedded thefts of intellectual property, of which the victims are unaware for maybe years if at all.

They do not identify the likely bad actors in the TA17-117A, which they rate as “Medium Risk”, but I would hazard a guess that they all have the same source as this attack that devastated the National Research Council a few years ago, the repercussions are still ongoing. I don’t know the reliability of Newt Gingrich figure of the losses being $360 Billion per annum last year, Trump alluded to the threat from China during his campaign, but the rhetoric has always been more about political controls, “we’ll send Governor Branstad over to tell them to stop”.

The summary of the TA17-117A update could simply be, they are deeply embedded in your networks, it’s very difficult to identify how and where, even more difficult to remove them. And some broad recommendations on how to prevent reinfection.
Unfortunately while TA17-117A gives detailed advice on what to look for, they do not give much advice on how to look for it, which I believe the majority of network and server administrators on the frontline would need guidance on, there are a large number of suites of computer forensics would be useful. But none as simple and complete as Microsoft COFEE (I would provide an official link, but there isn’t one), this is only available to law enforcement “from NW3C at www.nw3c.org or by contacting INTERPOL at COFEE@interpol.int”. Like WikiLeaks I am not to happy about this withholding of such a useful tool, It would probably be very simple to write further tools that could analyze the data collected by COFEE to flag any intrusion related to this and other advisories.

While the advisories themselves are great, in many cases they will be too little too late, it would be great if network and server admins had access to better tools without having to get as far as needing to report a crime.

Actually blocking these attacks, the advisory points you in the right direction, and methods will differ vastly depending on the environment, costs associated with risk would have to be taken into account so would also vary what controls can be put in place, but at a time when we are still having trouble getting users to encrypt their data and devices, and to use a password manager, we could all be doing more with general cyber security education, the potential damage to our economies from these attacks are really astronomic. $360bn p/a is just the cost to the US economy, that’s 60 times the amount of the funding provided to the National Cancer Institute, which fit the typical profile of the targets of these attacks, or half the amount spent by the US military as a whole annually.

Others have told me that the greatest risk to business today is ransomware, while the effects are horrid (seen it too many times) if you are unprotected, they are generally quite limited in the damage that they cause, and very easy to mitigate by never clicking on unknown links, having a script blocker, and keeping regular backups.

I’ve been reading some misleading articles on the subject of Endpoint vs Cloud Security, most notably this from Wordfence . Ironically I have used Wordfence a lot, their free plugin is often my first choice as a recommendation for someone with a $10 a month hosting account that doesn’t want to spend an equal amount on security, it does a great job at protecting most sites from the most common brute force attacks and blocking vulnerability scanners. Godaddy actually pre-install a similar but lightweight (no bloatware) plugin, Limit Login Attempts on all new installations of WordPress, great for purpose.

But this latest post of theirs, discussing bypassing, is disingenuous in the extreme, we all know that’s easily mitigated and is actually quite rare to even see it. “Security” plugin vendors only like to talk about Layer 7 ddos attacks, which is obvious as that is the niche they have carved out for themselves and they really don’t handle them at all well which is quite ironic. And they offer zero answers for layer 3/4 attacks and again rely on the host, Where as a WAF (Website Application Firewall) such as Sucuri’s sucks it all up (L7 & 3/4) for you, often with clients never knowing anything about it. While relying on a “security” plugin alone, your host could be taking you offline or charging you for extra bandwidth.

You have to remember that any “security” plugin is using your sites precious resources for any of their filtering and mitigation, sometimes slowing the site down during regular browsing, which should be a worry for anyone concerned with SEO as Google, prefers faster sites.

But just so I had some evidence to back this up, I ran some tests, setting up 2 Ubuntu 16.04 servers at DigitalOcean with private networking enabled, one with a default install of WordPress, the Genesis theme and no other plugins and the other an attack platform with wrk installed, easily setup and run:

Emulating a classic DDoS attack, here is how the attacks played out, rebooting between each attack, firstly before the attack was launched, I am showing 654260 available memory.

Firstly I tried an attack by blocking all but Sucuri’s IPs using UFW (my prefered method), the attack had zero effect on the victim, available memory stayed the same, wrk just gave up, Then I tried again under load with Sucuri Firewall’s bypass prevention code added to the .htaccess,

<FilesMatch ".*"> Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 192.88.134.0/23 Allow from 185.93.228.0/22 Allow from 2a02:fe80::/29 Allow from 66.248.200.0/22</FilesMatch>

in it’s simplicity it’s most peoples prefered option to prevent bypass and works in nearly all situations, unlike UFW/IPTables which wont. It wasn’t pretty, but the site stayed up, with available memory dropping to 561380, whilst serving 129279 403 block messages in 30 seconds.

Then I removed the bypass prevention codes and hit the site with WordFence only in it’s default installation, and crashed the site in the first few seconds, responding to only 29 requests, before server timeout errors were served. With available memory dropping to 114228. notice also how the database is being effected, unlike where the bypass prevention codes were used.

I did run an attack head on at the site while it was behind the Sucuri firewall, the website didn’t see a thing, after a few 403 errors were served by the firewall, the IDS kicked in, and the victim would never have noticed. I also ran an attack against the “naked” site, this went down in 4 seconds.

For fun I attacked the WordFence alone protected site, but increased the time to 120 seconds, mySQL needed restarting to recover site function.

This was not a real DDoS attack of course, I only launched a single application from a single server, but a very good replication of one, it was crippling against Wordfence, as if it wasn’t even installed, it even behaved slightly worse than the naked site, while their suggestion is to pass that mitigation onto the host works, they do charge for that as an additional service, and in many cases just shut your site down due to excess resource usage, that would be the case for any hosting less than $30 a month.

I’d suggest that Wordfence have no understanding of the concept of defence in depth, and rather than complementing a real firewall, they are trying to make out that their plugin is the answer to all your WordPress security concerns, which it just is not, Daniel Cid, CTO of Sucuri discusses this dangerous marketing method.

Disclaimer, I do work for Sucuri as the Sucuri Firewall support team lead.